After Bernie completed his talk, Rebuilding the Collapsed Contexts in Social Media, Bernie performed an analysis of the Twitter API using NodeXL to build a network diagram of all the people who had tweeted with the hashtag #smwLDN.

Click on image for full size

To help us understand it, Bernie included the following notes when he sent over the image for us to publish on the Local Social Summit blog.

This is a twitter network of all people who tweeted #smwLDN

People who ended up retweeted or mentioned by at least 4 others have a thumbnail and label. Color means number of followers – red means lots of followers, blue means few followers.

In the center is one big group, linked through several tenuous connections such as Jeremy Jacobs and mediaczar.

In the upper right is another group with stevebridger and 1000heads.

In the bottom are all the small groups of singletons or dyads who tweeted the tag.

The arrows point outwards showing where tweets went as people mentioned or retweeted #smwLDN. Clearly, its paid off for the organizers to be be active in using their own hash tag as smwLDN has the high number of mentions outwards.

All of the nodes that seem to fan out from a single person highlight someone who has a relatively active audience. Some of these people share an audience, too.  SteveBridger and lesanto have a lot of fans incommon (since these fans retweeted or mentioned both of these people).  The same can be said for EEPaul and BernieJMitchell.

But of course, this graph also shows that Twitter is a rather thin medium. Social Media Week London had 16,000 followers, and yet the application only picked up 30 retweets or mentions from them (mazi has most herein with 34,800).

Bernie is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and we feel lucky to have had him speak so far at two Local Social Summit events.   Amongst other more academic venues, Bernie’s work on Facebook will be featured in the forthcoming “Analyzing Social Media with NodeXL” edited by Derek Hansen, Marc Smith and Ben Shneiderman due in mid-July.

You can find more about Bernie on his Oxford Internet Institute microsite or follow him on Twitter.

The coffee was the El Salvador Finca Los Amates Bourbon Cup of Excellence 2009 and below is the episode of Steve’s weekly video show, In My Mug, where he cups this special coffee.

To my knowledge only a small number of us have been closely tracking the Local Social Media intersection for a few years.  But since Dylan and I organised  the first Local Social Summit, it feels like the world has taken notice and Local Social is going mainstream.

The Week that was in Local Social

Below, are some of the main stories from last week that caught my attention.

Yelp gets funding of $100 million.  My opinion is that this funding was the plan all along and Yelp played Google to get a solid valuation: a dangerous game to be playing.  Greg Sterling interviewed Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman to get some more details on where that money will be going.  As the PR on the investment came out during the Apple iPad launch, Henry Blodget’s harsh headline was:  Yelp Wins Award For Dumbest Funding-Announcement Timing Ever.

AT&T to launch buzz.com.  From what I’ve read, sounds like it’s geared towards mobile and is a standard Local business ratings services with a question function, tied into a friends and family social graph.  What I like about this is that it’s innovation from an old school telco.

Twitter has rolled out Local Trends to everyone (& the API).  The obvious point is that 3rd party innovation will make something interesting out of this.  One possible use is utilising the Local Trends as a solid data source for BI over Local information to determine requirements for things like:  Emergency Services and Content.

Citysearch launches openweb distribution to Local content and ads.  This is a smart play and one the traditional IYPs or those with heavy destination site content and advertisers should be looking to lock down as a move globally.

Facebook are looking at building a Foursquare killer.  Whatever, but what is interesting (both Greg Sterling and Seb Provencher agree on this one) is the comment from Foursquare co-founder, Dennis Crowley, who:

fully expects Facebook and others to launch "check-in" functionality, making it [a] "commodity by the end of the year."

As I’ve said for a few months now, I’m not that interested in the checkin but I believe the checkout is where this trend needs to be heading.  Once that happens, then you’re going to see widespread SMB engagement and things will get interesting in the Local Social games niche.

In Seb Provencher’s required reading deck regarding the Perfect local media company of 2014, which was presented for the first time at Local Social Summit ‘09, checkin is listed as one of the standard features.  You can see the video of that lab session below.

Some more links from last week

• Foursquare’s New Frontier: Newspapers
• Beatbloggers recruited for Guardian Local project
• Localeze To Power Local Business Listings For Bing

Video of the Perfect Local Media Company from Local Social Summit ‘09

Local Social Summit is very excited that Stephen Leighton owner of leading UK coffee roaster, Has Bean, has agreed to come speak at LSS@Social Media Week on 4th February 2010.

We are planning to have a conversation with Steve about how as an artisan coffee roaster he is utilising a proliferation of Social Media channels to build engagement with his customers and the coffee community in general.

In reality, we’re fanboys of Steve (and without saying the amazing coffee Hasbean brings back to the UK) and would be happy if he just comes along and shares his wonderful passion for coffee and with that his direct trade approach with growers (actually, here’s hoping we get some of that because when you think about it, that’s still Local Social).  Regardless of what Steve talks about, our hope is that those who come along to LSS@Social Media Week will agree with us by the end of the evening when we say, we believe Stephen Leighton is coffee’s rising answer to Gary Vee.

To get a taste of why we think that, here’s a video from In My Mug, Steve’s weekly video show:

To fully get an understanding of how Steve is using Social Media in furthering the success of Hasbean, we suggest you:

• Read his blog
• Follow him on Twitter
• Check out the photo stream on Flickr
• Watch episodes of In My Mug or check out the Hasbean Vimeo channel
• Not forgetting the Hasforum

You can read more about the LSS@Social Media Week event by clicking here.  Go to the eventbrite microsite or start the booking process below:

LSS@Social Media Week:  The Science of Social Media

It could be said that most people have faith that Social Media is more than a new hype bubble. While faith alone isn’t a bad thing, we plan to add some reason as we explore the Science of Social Media

LSS@Social Media Week is brought to you by:

Confirmed Speakers:

• Dr. Bernie Hogan from the Oxford Internet Institute – Bernie will taking time out from his busy teaching and media schedule to present his latest research into the emerging issue of social information overload and effective methodologies for leveraging online interactions and new media in everyday life.
• Stephen Leighton owner of Has Bean Coffee: http://www.hasbean.co.uk/ – A conversation with the up and coming UK and coffee’s answer to Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library and Crushit)
• Paul McCrudden - from Imagination & #6weeks fame, will share insights and knowledge from how consumers are interacting with brands
• Carolyn Watt, Founder and Managing Director of Yabber, Profero’s digital PR and social media division will be presenting an exciting case study

When: Thursday, 4th February 2010, 6:30pm-8:30pm
Where: The Hospital Club (http://www.thehospitalclub.com/)

Social Media Week: The second annual conference will take place between February 1st – 5th, 2010 simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo. The five day conference will explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.

More Details & Register:

For more details click here to go to the event page and you can get your tickets through the eventbrite ticket microsite.

Afterwards found this piece from the Onion News Network, which being a Friday, hopefully you will agree highlights some of the problems with being a friend of your Mom on Social Media.

First was the decks from the day onto SlideShare.  We have just received notification that we are featured on the SlideShare homepage. ( Screengrab below).

Will be interesting to see the impact of that bump vs. the organic growth that was occuring.

In true social media sharing style we have put all the presentations up on the LSS Slideshare account.

We think most attendees will agree that two of the highlighst for the day were the keynote presentations which you will find below… Video and audio podcasts to following a few days as well…

• Keynote: Making sense of the networked audience: The case of Facebook
  - Dr. Bernie Hogan is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute

• Keynote: Decoding Generation Y: Who really has digital friends? – Robert Barnard, Founder of Decode

• Mobile panel is now 11.40am
• Local Gets Social is now 2.10pm
• Local Content & Monetisation is now 3.50pm

All times are GMT. Full schedule see below…